In tomorrow's SocietyGuardian section

•Newcastle council is making horrendous cuts but, its leader Nick Forbes tells Patrick Butler, it is central government that's causing the damage• Kate Belgrave visits people in north-east England whose lives are affected by the cuts in public services• To deliver the services their communities need in a climate of cuts, local authorities must look at the whole range, and different combinations, of delivery options, says Anne Torry• People living with serious mental health problems deserve New Year honours, says Clare Allan• The biggest challenge for the NHS in 2013 is to change its culture of secrecy, cover-up and authoritarian management, writes Jeremy Taylor• The country is facing a housing crisis comparable to the early postwar years, when the 50s equivalent of 'sofa surfing' became a necessity. Why aren't alarm bells ringing in No 10, asks Peter Hetherington• How did a measure that required offenders to carry out socially beneficial work turn into a form of punishment?• In April, new legislation will end legal aid for foreign national prisoners facing deportation. Melanie McFadyean reports

On my radar ...

• The welfare benefits uprating bill, which is being debated by MPs today. Andrew Sparrow, who is following all the day's developments on the Politics live blog, writes:

The bill imposes a 1% cap on benefit increases (ie, an effective cut) until 2016 and it is a testament to Osborne's ingenuity because it is a piece of legislation that is both apparently popular and opposed by the Labour party. At the Conservative conference last year Osborne started making a distinction between "strivers" and "shirkers", the people who supposedly stay at home with the curtains drawn while everyone else goes out to work, and the bill is designed to place Labour on the side of the "shirkers".

In the Observer at the weekend, Andrew Rawnsley said it should be properly described as the Welfare (Make Labour Look Like the Party for Skiving Fat Slobs) bill. Before Christmas the Conservatives launched an advertising campaign that actually depicted a slob (but not a particularly fat one) on the sofa. More recently the Conservatives have toned down their "skivers" language, but they are still on the offensive and today they have launched a new poster attacking Labour for opposing the bill.Sparrow also shares research by the TUC showing that opposition to welfare spending is based on ignorance about where the money actually goes. On a similar theme, Alex Andreou tweeted this morningWhy assume your tax is paying for a lazy scrounger? Statistically, much likelier to be paying for a teacher or someone's dialysis.

The Welfare State's huge appeal lay in its combination of simplicity and assurance. A safety net to catch those fallen on hard times, come rain or shine, boom or bust, it would be there for all those who had paid in.Such universality allowed people to project on to it whatever they wished. Welfare State's father, the Liberal William Beveridge, described his offspring as "an attack on Want", one of the five evil giants that had to be slain in postwar Britain. But for future Labour prime minister Clement Attlee, "Social security to us can only mean socialism".

And he concludes:

The death of Welfare does not mean an end to all benefit spending. Instead, it is outlived by its predecessor, Poor Relief, in which only the very poorest will receive government cash. Analysts are unsure about the repercussions.

The word "benefit" is, in many ways, a misleading one. There is no physical, emotional, or social benefit to being reliant on government support. The situation is made even worse when the rhetoric of "scroungers" or "freeloaders" is employed.

In areas such as health, social care funding and offender rehabilitation, reform is patchy, while projects such as the Work Programme have been hobbled by design flaws that have forced many charities to withdraw from it. Grand ideas set out in the coalition's first flush of youth, such as a "right to choice" for service users, have been quietly dropped altogether.The result of this inaction is that the prime minister's warnings about the impact of cuts without accompanying reforms have been proven to be exactly right. The most vulnerable have borne the brunt of austerity, creating rising demand for the support offered by charities. Yet many charities themselves have faced crippling cuts, with 50% of local authorities admitting to making disproportionate cuts to charity funding in their area. What's more, charities are now being discouraged from applying proper scrutiny and challenge to the decisions of central and local government.Consequently I wrote to the prime minister last week asking him to take a few simple steps to help restore the relationship between the coalition and the voluntary sector. I would like to see the government reaffirm its commitment to charitable activity, for example by increasing its support for payroll giving. I would also like to see a push for genuinely independent scrutiny of major spending decisions to assess their impact on the most vulnerable. And crucially, the prime minister and his government must find their way again on public service reform.